Читать книгу The Close of the Middle Ages, 1272-1494 - Richard Sir Lodge - Страница 8

Table of Contents

The Empire—German divisions—The Interregnum—Rudolf of Hapsburg—His War with Ottokar—Adolf of Nassau—His relations with France—His fall—Albert I.—The Succession in Hungary and Bohemia—The Election of Henry VII.—His Italian Expedition—His Concessions to the Princes—His son John and the Bohemian Crown—The French seizure of Lyons—The importance of the Period 1273-1313 in German History

Ever since A.D. 962 the German monarchy had been combined |The Empire and the German monarchy.| with the Roman Empire, and the union proved harmful to both offices. The universal authority of the Emperor could hardly fail to become shadowy and unreal, but it was rendered more distasteful to non-German princes and peoples by the immediate association of the Empire with a distinct kingdom, with which they might have causes of quarrel. And as the Empire became more and more localised, so the German kingship became steadily weaker. The shadowy character of the higher dignity tended to produce the same impression as to the more real and practical office. The princes who held their lands of the German king aimed more and more at the independence of the external kings and rulers, who, in feudal theory, held of the Emperor. The imperial claims brought the Empire into collision with the Papacy, and the German monarchy suffered from the blows which the Emperor’s power received in the great Contest of Investitures. Moreover, the Empire carried with it the crown of Italy; and the constant waste of money and men in the vain attempt to establish a real dominion in the southern peninsula, not only weakened individual German rulers, but also led to constant absences from Germany which gave occasion to their northern vassals to acquire independence. Above all the Empire was, by tradition and by the very conception of the office, elective. Thus the German kings were deprived of all the advantages which normal hereditary succession gave to the rulers of England and France. Not only did disputed elections give rise to civil war with all its evils, but the constant change from one family to another rendered impossible any consistent policy of strengthening the central power. When at last the Hapsburgs obtained quasi-hereditary possession of the imperial dignity, disunion had made such progress that it was too late to apply a remedy.

The decline of the central power and the consequent rise |German divisions.| of a large number of semi-independent political units, each with a separate existence of its own, though held together by certain common duties and interests, make German history in this period peculiarly difficult and complicated. And the number of these units was far greater in the thirteenth century than would have seemed likely at an earlier date. The great duchies formed by the Karolings had, by the policy of subsequent rulers, been broken up or allowed to become extinct. The great duchy of Swabia, for instance, came to an end with the Hohenstaufen, and was never revived. But the extinction of each duchy brought with it an immense increase of the number of tenants-in-chief. Every noble, town, and even village which had previously held of the duke, now claimed to hold directly of the Emperor; and though many of the weaker units fell victims to the greed of powerful neighbours, yet some, like the original members of the Swiss Confederation, succeeded in retaining the coveted position. In Germany, too, primogeniture was in those days a rare exception, and the practice of equal partition among brothers necessarily led to a great increase in the number of princely tenants of the Emperor.

It is, of course, impossible in this volume to attempt to |The lay princes.| trace the separate history of the various principalities and states which fill the rather ill-defined territory known as Germany. But it is necessary at starting to have a clear conception of some of the chief families which play so important a part in subsequent history. The four most prominent princely houses in the middle of the thirteenth century were those of Ascania, Welf, Wittelsbach, and Wettin. The first was sub-divided into two lines, descended from the two sons of Albert the Bear. The elder son had held the marks of Brandenburg in the north, which, since 1267, were split up among several brothers. The younger son, Bernard, had in 1180 received from Frederick Barbarossa the diminished duchy of Saxony, which was now held by his grandson, Albert II. (1261-1298). The great family of Welf, so powerful in the previous century, was now confined to the duchy of Brunswick, afterwards sub-divided into Lüneburg (Hanover) and Wolfenbüttel (Brunswick). The House of Wittelsbach was represented by two brothers, Lewis II., who combined the duchy of Upper Bavaria with the Palatine county (Pfalzgrafschaft) of the Rhine, and Henry, who held the duchy of Lower Bavaria. Henry of Wettin, whose descendants acquired Saxony in the fifteenth century and retain it to the present day, was at this time Margrave of Meissen and Landgrave of Thuringia. But the most powerful individual prince at this time was Ottokar, ruler of the Slav kingdom of Bohemia, which was brought by geography and history into close connection with Germany. To Bohemia, which he inherited in 1253 from his father, Wenzel I., Ottokar had added by marriage and diplomacy Austria, Styria, Carinthia, and Carniola, and thus held a secure predominance in south-eastern Germany. There were also three lesser families, as yet insignificant, and not regarded as belonging to the princely class, which were destined within this period to rise to importance in Germany, while two of them have taken a position among the greatest dynasties Europe has ever seen. The House of Luxemburg, in the thirteenth century the lords of a petty county near the western frontier, produced in the next century four Emperors, and founded a territorial power which survived the family which had created it. The Hapsburgs, hitherto known only as active and successful nobles in Swabia, within this period built up a considerable state in south-eastern Germany, and succeeded to the position which the Luxemburgs had founded. Finally, the Hohenzollerns, who in the thirteenth century combined scattered territories in Franconia with the office of Burggraf of Nürnberg, acquired the electorate of Brandenburg in the fifteenth century, and though their power grew more slowly than that of the Luxemburgs and Hapsburgs, yet it rested on a surer foundation, owed more to ability and policy than to fortune, and may prove in the end both more brilliant and more durable.

Among the great territorial princes of Germany must be |The Bishops.| reckoned the very numerous ecclesiastical tenants-in-chief of the Empire. A large area of German soil, especially along the valleys of the Rhine and the Main, was held by bishops and monasteries. Of these clerical princes the most powerful and prominent were the Rhenish archbishops of Mainz, Köln, and Trier. In former times the bishops had been severed from the secular princes by class interests and traditions, and the separation had been encouraged by many of the Emperors, whose policy was to exalt themselves by playing one off against the other. But after the middle of the thirteenth century this distinction tends to become obscured. The rivalry between Emperors and Popes, though it does not disappear, ceases to be the dominant factor in German relations; and during the papal residence in Avignon (1305-1376) the German bishops become to some extent alienated from the Papacy. The result is that the German princes, both clerical and secular, come to form a fairly united class; and the most obvious interest which binds them together is the desire to strengthen their own independence, their ‘liberty,’ as they call it, by weakening the central power. On the other hand, the lesser tenants-in-chief below the princely rank, known in later history as the Ritterschaft, or knights, are impelled to cling to the monarchy for support against the constant danger of princely encroachments.

Besides the princes and knights, there is a very important |The imperial cities.| body of tenants-in-chief—the Reichstädte, or imperial cities. These had risen to importance, partly through the economic conditions which gave them wealth, and partly through the policy of several of the Emperors, who had encouraged the growth of municipal life as a source of revenue and as a check upon the power of the princes. German cities may be divided roughly into two great groups: those in the south, like Augsburg, Nürnberg, Ratisbon, etc., which obtained importance from their position on the great commercial routes leading from Venice and Genoa to different parts of Europe; and those in the north, on the Baltic and the German Ocean, whose function was to carry on the trade between the east and the west of Northern Europe, and to exchange at Bruges the products of the north for the commodities brought by the southern merchants (see p. 422). The strength of the towns lay in their wealth and their walls; their weakness in their isolation and mutual jealousy. This weakness the southern cities never overcame; their leagues for common objects were never durable, and therefore never effectual. But the northern towns were left more to themselves: they came into contact with less developed states, and they were subject to the pressure of more constant and more immediate political interests. The necessity of securing trade privileges in the countries lying to the east and west of the Baltic, and the duty of defending their commercial routes against the aggressive Scandinavian state of Denmark, which commanded the outlets from the Baltic, forced the northern towns into a semi-federal union, and the Hanseatic League became for a time a great political power in the north. In the end the northern cities also succumbed, owing mainly to a great change in trade routes, and partly to the growing predominance of the princes. But at the beginning of this period the future destiny of the German towns was unknown, and to contemporaries it seemed quite possible that cities like Nürnberg and Augsburg, or Lübeck and Hamburg, might obtain an independence and a power not markedly inferior to that which was actually acquired at this time by Venice and Florence, which were in theory equally tenants-in-chief of the Empire, though further removed from the exercise of imperial authority.

The decline of the German kingship had begun in the |The Interregnum and its results.| eleventh century, but a partial revival had been effected by the great Hohenstaufen Emperors, Frederick Barbarossa, Henry VI., and Frederick II. With the fall of the Hohenstaufen both Empire and monarchy sank lower than they had ever done before. During the Great Interregnum (1256-1273), two rival kings, the Englishman Richard of Cornwall, and the Castilian king, Alfonso X., had secured the nominal adherence of conflicting parties in Germany, but neither had attempted to rule the country. In these years not only did the tenants-in-chief enjoy complete independence of any external authority, but the imperial domains were either annexed by the princes, or squandered by the two royal claimants in the attempt to purchase adherents. This rendered it impossible to revive the old monarchy, and produced changes which seemed to render German unity for ever hopeless. Hitherto the elected Emperor had resigned his hereditary dominions, and had supported himself on the domain-lands, travelling about from one estate to another. This was no longer possible. The only way in which a future king could hope to secure any respect or obedience was to acquire such a territorial power as would make him formidable. Such a policy, consistently pursued by a line of hereditary kings, might have resulted in the gradual formation of a territorial monarchy like that of France. But the princes made use of their right of election, at first to prevent the kingship passing to successive members of the same family, and always to impose conditions which should secure their own independence. The evil results became abundantly plain in the century which followed the Interregnum. Each successive Emperor set himself, not so much to strengthen the monarchy, as to aggrandise his own family; and the more successful he was, the more dangerous and objectionable did that family become to his successor. The same conditions which produced nepotism in the Papacy, led to the adoption of a consistent policy of dynastic aggrandisement by all the Emperors from Rudolf of Hapsburg onwards.

In 1272 the death of Richard of Cornwall forced his |Election of Rudolf I.| adherents to consider the question of a new election, and at the same time Pope Gregory X., alarmed by the excessive power of the House of Anjou in Italy, and afraid lest German disunion might give occasion for French aggression north of the Alps, used all his influence to urge on the unanimous choice of a new king in Germany. For a long time the right of election had tended to fall into fewer hands. The early German kings were selected by the chief men and approved by the acclamations of a mass meeting of all freemen. Gradually the form of popular approval disappeared, and the princely tenants-in-chief assumed an absolute power of nomination. Since then the practice had grown up of a preliminary choice by some of the chief princes, to be ratified by the rest. But in the thirteenth century the idea arose that certain princes could elect without any further ceremony. Superstition and custom seem to have combined to suggest the number seven for these electors, as they came to be called. But there were several contending claimants for the right to be included in the favoured seven, and it was not till the next century that these disputes were finally settled. On the present occasion the lead was taken by the great Rhenish princes, the Count Palatine with the three Archbishops. The only chance of securing a general adhesion of the princes was to choose a king who was not so strong as to excite either fear or jealousy. Mainly through the exertions of Frederick III. of Hohenzollern, Burggraf of Nürnberg, the choice of the electors fell upon his cousin Rudolf, Count of Hapsburg, who was crowned at Aachen on October 24, 1273. It is not a little curious that the election of the first Hapsburg was brought about by the influence of a Hohenzollern.

Rudolf’s position was no easy one when, at the age of |Rudolf’s policy.| fifty-five, he was called from his successful career in the petty politics of Swabia^[1] to assume the German kingship. He had a large family of daughters, whose marriages served to gain him adherents. At the coronation ceremony one had been married to Lewis of Wittelsbach, and another to Albert of Saxony. But such a tie was insufficient to secure the docile obedience of his sons-in-law if he endeavoured to exercise any real authority over them. Alfonso of Castile retained the title of king of the Romans, and though for the time he was powerless, his pretensions might easily serve as a pretext for malcontents. A more formidable opponent was Ottokar of Bohemia, whose claim to a voice in the election had been disregarded, and who refused to acknowledge the ‘pauper count’ of Hapsburg. In these circumstances Rudolf showed all the prudence and foresight that had already won him a reputation. He realised that it was no longer possible to revive the pretensions of the Hohenstaufen. He could not afford to alienate the Pope or to aim at the recovery of an Italian kingdom. He must content himself with obtaining what reality he could for the royal power in Germany, and must find a territorial basis for that power. The most obvious method of doing this was the restoration of the duchy of Swabia in his own family, which would enable him to achieve the aims which he had hitherto pursued. But such a step would involve a quarrel with Lewis of Wittelsbach, who claimed to be regarded the heir of the Hohenstaufen. Rudolf could not venture on such a risk, and he fell back on the plan of wresting from Ottokar the German fiefs in the south-east, which the latter had seized during the Interregnum. Before attempting this, Rudolf had to gain over the Pope, the close ally of the Bohemian king. Through the agency of Frederick of Hohenzollern he concluded a concordat with Gregory X., by which he confirmed all previous concessions of Italian territory to the Papacy, and recognised the Angevin kingdom of Naples and Sicily. These promises were subsequently confirmed in a personal interview with Gregory at Lausanne (October, 1275). In March 1280 Rudolf made a direct treaty with Charles of Anjou, by which he confirmed his possession of Provence, and agreed to marry his daughter Clementia to Charles’s grandson. Thus the policy of Frederick II. was finally abandoned. To secure undisturbed freedom of action in Germany, Rudolf resigned Italy to the Pope and the House of Anjou.

Rudolf’s alliance with the Pope made him strong enough |War with Ottokar.| to take active measures against Ottokar, whose refusal to recognise the election on the ground that his vote had been rejected irritated the German princes. At successive diets, in 1274 and 1275, he was summoned to justify his occupation of Austria, Styria, Carinthia, and Carniola, and on his refusal was called upon to resign these fiefs. In 1276 Rudolf collected an imperial army and advanced into Austria, where he was welcomed by a general rising of the German nobles against Slav rule. Vienna capitulated, and Ottokar, finding resistance hopeless, made peace on November 21. On condition that Bohemia and Moravia should be secured to him, he resigned the German provinces. The treaty was to be confirmed by a double marriage of his daughter to Rudolf’s son Hartmann, and of his son Wenzel to one of Rudolf’s numerous daughters. Rudolf was so confident in the results of his victory, that he hastened to disband his army. But Ottokar had no intention of carrying out the treaty of Vienna, and he succeeded in gaining over many of the chief German princes by representing the danger of allowing a strong Hapsburg power to be established on the Danube. The result was a renewal of the struggle in 1278 under widely altered conditions. The death of Gregory X. (1276) had deprived Rudolf of much of the advantage gained by his concordat with the Papacy. The Archbishops of Mainz and Köln turned against him. Lewis of Wittelsbach remained obstinately neutral. Henry of Lower Bavaria, whom Rudolf had gained over in 1276 by a politic marriage, openly supported Ottokar, who was also aided by the Ascanian margraves of Brandenburg. In place of the imposing army of 1276, the only German princes who sent active aid to Rudolf were Frederick of Hohenzollern and the Bishop of Basel. But the balance was turned in his favour by the alliance of Ladislaus IV. of Hungary and by the support of the Austrian and Styrian nobles, whom Ottokar had failed to conciliate. In a great battle on the Marchfeld, the victory was decided by a charge of the heavy-armed cavalry under Frederick of Hohenzollern, and Ottokar himself perished on the field (August 26, 1278). His death made Rudolf’s victory decisive. Otto of Brandenburg, who undertook the guardianship of the young king of Bohemia, Wenzel II., negotiated a treaty in October which renewed the stipulations of 1276 as to the cession of the Austrian provinces and the double marriage between the Hapsburg and Bohemian families. In December 1282 Rudolf formally invested his sons, Albert and Rudolf, with the imperial fiefs of Austria, Styria, and Carniola. The duchy of Carinthia was given to Meinhard, Count of Tyrol, whose daughter was married to Albert of Austria.

The establishment of the Hapsburg dynasty in Austria is |Rudolf in later years.| an important event in German history. It was the great achievement of Rudolf’s reign, and it was his last notable success. His later attempts to strengthen the central monarchy in Germany were, in the main, fruitless. A series of edicts to secure the public peace by restricting the practice of private war, gained the grateful approval of the towns and the lesser nobles, but were rendered ineffectual by the absence in Germany of an efficient system of jurisdiction and police. An ordinance prohibiting the creation of any new county (Grafschaft) without royal consent illustrates the general aim of Rudolf’s government, but proved little more than a dead letter. The recovery of the lost imperial domains, which Rudolf had pledged himself to undertake at his election, was a task beyond his strength. Even the towns, on whose support he reckoned, were alienated by his attempt to raise an imperial revenue by their taxation; and the appearance of a number of pretenders claiming to be Frederick II. showed a tendency to contrast Rudolf’s government with that of his predecessor, who had been enabled to spare his German subjects by the wealth which he extracted from Italy. A still more serious difficulty was the obstinate refusal of the electors to choose his son Albert as his successor during his own lifetime. This was the most pressing object of Rudolf’s last years, and it was unfulfilled when he died on July 15, 1291, at the age of seventy-three. If he had lived two centuries earlier, he might have ranked among the greatest of German kings; as it is, he will always be remembered as the founder of the greatest of German dynasties.

The objection to Albert of Austria rested on the considerable |Adolf of Nassau.| territories, both in the east and in Swabia, which he inherited from his father. The same motives which had induced the electors in 1273 to choose Rudolf, led them to look for a successor whose position should be still more humble than Rudolf’s had been. The influence of the Archbishop of Mainz, Gerhard von Eppenstein, secured the election of another ‘poor count,’ Adolf of Nassau (May 5, 1292). He had purchased votes by promises, which he could only fulfil by pawning the scanty remnants of the imperial domains. But Adolf’s ambition was greater than his material power, and he had no intention of reigning as the submissive puppet of the electors. No sooner had he received the crown at Aachen (June 24) than he led an army against Albert, and forced him to do homage and to surrender the royal insignia which he had retained on his father’s death. To repress the great princes, Adolf set himself to conciliate the towns and the lesser nobles. Taking advantage of the death of Frederick of Meissen and Thuringia, he claimed those territories as vacant imperial fiefs, and prepared to found there a hereditary principality as his predecessor had done on the Danube. Still more noteworthy was the attitude which he assumed towards France. The kingdom of Arles or Burgundy, |Relations with France.| founded by Rudolf I. (888-912) and enlarged by Rudolf II. (912-937) had, after the death of Rudolf III. (1032), fallen to the German king, Conrad II. Since then the crown of Arles had been regarded as one of the three crowns, with those of Germany and Italy, which passed on election to successive kings of the Romans. But as the German monarchy declined, the supremacy in Burgundy became more and more nominal, and many Emperors neglected the ceremony of coronation at Arles altogether. The kingdom split up into a number of quasi-independent provinces, of which the chief were the free county of Burgundy (Franche-comté), Savoy, Dauphiné, the Lyonnais, and Provence. These provinces, though in theory they were held as fiefs of the Empire, were gradually subjected to systematic aggressions from the side of France, and Philip IV. (1285-1314) pursued this policy of absorption more boldly and openly than any of his predecessors. Adolf sought to strengthen himself by posing as the champion of the unity of the Empire, and in 1294 concluded a treaty with Edward I. of England by which the two princes pledged themselves not to lay down their arms until Philip had withdrawn from the territories he was trying to wrest from both of them. But the war which followed only brought out clearly the disunion and military impotence of Germany. The German princes cared nothing for the border provinces as compared with their own interests and independence. It was easy for Philip IV. to stir up opposition to Adolf, and when peace was negotiated by Boniface VIII. in 1298, no satisfaction was given to the imperial claims.

Meanwhile the electors and princes had been seriously |Adolf’s fall.| alarmed by Adolf’s alliance with the lesser nobles and towns, and by his temporary successes in Thuringia. To put down the prince whom they had chosen, they turned to Albert of Austria whom they had rejected. Albert, who had already formed a close alliance with Wenzel II. of Bohemia, and had been in communication with the French king, was eager to strike a blow for his father’s crown. The Archbishop of Mainz summoned a meeting of princes to Frankfort on May 1, 1298, and Albert set out to attend it with an army at his back. Adolf, however, collected troops from his supporters among the lesser nobles, and prepared to dispute his passage. By superior strategy Albert marched round his opponent to the south, and succeeded in reaching Mainz, whither the meeting was transferred. Here the electors formally declared Adolf’s deposition (June 23), but the irregular proposal of Albert of Saxony to elect Albert of Austria on the spot met with no support. The army of the princes now advanced against the king, and after a desperate struggle near Göllheim, Adolf was slain—struck from his horse, it was said, by the hand of his rival (July 2). He had made a brief but creditable attempt to rule as a German king, but was too weak to face the hostile coalition of the princes. His schemes in Thuringia and Meissen perished with him, and the House of Wettin recovered its territories.

After Albert’s victory as champion of the electors, the |Albert I.| latter could no longer avoid choosing him to fill the vacant throne; but they soon had ample reason to recognise the wisdom of their previous refusal. Albert inherited his father’s policy, with more restless energy and greater military capacity. What he might have done for the Hapsburg dynasty and the German monarchy if his career had not been prematurely cut short by assassination it is impossible to say, but the ten years of his reign are full of great enterprises, most of which promised successful results. The reputation for cruelty which he bears in history is mainly due to the sternness of his manner and appearance, increased by the loss of an eye, and to the fables which have grown up round him in the more than dubious traditions of the Swiss.

To coerce Pope Boniface VIII., who refused to acknowledge |Albert’s policy.| his election, Albert concluded a treaty with Philip IV. of France, who had a quarrel of his own with the Papacy, and thus abandoned the attempt of Adolf to defend the Burgundian frontiers. In December, 1299, he had a personal interview with Philip, and arranged a marriage between the French princess Blanche and his eldest son Rudolf. In German politics he set himself to favour the towns against the princes, and infuriated the latter by an edict abolishing all tolls on the Rhine imposed since the death of Frederick II. in 1250. The death of the Count of Holland and Zealand (October, 1299) gave him an opportunity to claim these provinces as vacant imperial fiefs in opposition to John of Hainault, who claimed the inheritance through his mother. This scheme, however, proved a failure, and the House of Avesnes succeeded in adding Holland and Zealand to Hainault. Encouraged by Albert’s check in the north-west, the Rhenish archbishops and the Elector Palatine, furious at the threatened loss of their tolls, formed a league against the king whom they had voted for two years before. But Albert was not so powerless as Adolf had been. Backed by the enthusiastic support of the cities and aided by French auxiliaries, he took the aggressive against his opponents, and compelled them not only to abolish the tolls, but to recognise the right of the towns to receive burghers of the pale (Pfahlbürger)—that is, to confer the privileges and immunities of citizenship on residents in the suburbs outside the walls. Few German kings since Henry III. had been so successful in coercing their powerful vassals as was Albert in these campaigns of 1301 and 1302.

For the next few years Albert’s attention was mainly |Succession in Hungary.| absorbed in eastern affairs. The death of Andrew III., the last male of the Arpad dynasty in Hungary, left that kingdom without any obvious heir. There were two candidates, who were descended from the royal family through females—Otto of Lower Bavaria, and Charles Robert or Carobert, the grandson of Charles II., the Angevin king of Naples. But the Magyar nobles passed over both, and offered the crown to Wenzel II. of Bohemia, who accepted it for his son Wenzel III. Such an accession of power to the Premyslides was entirely opposed to Albert’s interests, both as King of Germany and as Duke of Austria. As he had no love for the Wittelsbachs in Lower Bavaria, he did not hesitate to espouse the cause of Carobert, the son of his sister Clementia, and the candidate supported by Boniface VIII., with whom Albert had reconciled himself in 1302. For a time the Bohemian power proved too strong, but the death of Wenzel II. (June, 1305) and the growing discontent in Hungary with the conduct of the young king, enabled Carobert to secure the crown, though his title was disputed for a time by Otto of Wittelsbach.

In the next year (August, 1306) the murder of the young |Succession in Bohemia.| Wenzel III. left the Bohemian crown itself vacant. The sister of the late king had married Henry of Carinthia and Tyrol, the brother of Albert’s wife.^[2] In spite of this relationship Albert claimed the kingdom as a vacant fief, and conferred it upon his eldest son Rudolf. The consent of the Bohemian nobles was extorted or purchased, and an agreement that Rudolf’s brothers should succeed if he himself died childless, seemed to secure to the Hapsburgs the permanent possession of a kingdom which, added to their Austrian territories, would make them all-powerful on the eastern frontier of Germany. This was the greatest of Albert’s achievements, and, if the acquisition had been permanent, would have made his reign as important in Hapsburg history as his father’s had been. But his last years were clouded with disappointment. An attempt to renew his predecessor’s claims upon Meissen and Thuringia was repulsed by Frederick of Wettin, who defeated the royal army, under Frederick of Hohenzollern, near Altenburg (May 31, 1307). This defeat was followed by the sudden death, on July 4, of the youthful Rudolf of Bohemia. The Bohemians had tired of Hapsburg rule, and in spite of the agreement made at Rudolf’s election, they now offered the crown to Henry of Carinthia. Albert had already made one incursion into Bohemia, and was preparing another, |Albert’s death.| when he was treacherously murdered by his nephew, John (May 1, 1308).

John was the son of Albert’s brother Rudolf and Agnes, daughter of Ottokar, and seems to have resented his uncle’s refusal either to support his candidature for the Bohemian crown, or to give him any share of the Hapsburg territories. The assassination, therefore, was the result of mere personal pique, but it was as important as if it had arisen from a deep-laid political scheme. If Albert had lived longer he would very probably have established his son Frederick in Bohemia, and rendered his election to the German kingship inevitable. In that case the Hapsburgs might have founded a territorial monarchy in Germany, and the House of Luxemburg would never have risen from obscurity. The complaint that Albert neglected to enforce imperial pretensions in Italy is well founded, but should rather be set to the credit of his political capacity. The Italian connection was fatal to the best interests of Germany. A far more serious criticism is his failure to resist the aggressions of France. He aided the House of Anjou to acquire the crown of Hungary in addition to that of Naples, and although for the moment Charles Robert’s candidature was opposed by Philip IV., it was certain that in the long-run the Angevin and Capet interests would combine the two families. He made no opposition to the transference of the papal residence from Rome to Avignon, though the disadvantage to Germany was obvious when Clement V. filled the Rhenish archbishoprics with partisans of France.

It resulted from these changes that French influence was |Election of Henry VII.| very prominent in the election of 1308, and was strong enough to secure the exclusion of Albert’s heir, Frederick the Handsome. Philip IV.’s brother, Charles of Valois, came forward as a candidate and was openly supported by the Pope. But the secular princes were strong enough to resist such a sacrifice of German interests to ecclesiastical pressure, although their own interests prevented them from supporting the Hapsburg. At this juncture, the Archbishop Baldwin of Trier (appointed in 1307) suggested as a compromise the choice of his brother, Henry of Luxemburg. He was the descendant of the counts of Limburg and Arlon, who had acquired Luxemburg by marriage in 1214. His territorial power was too small to inspire jealousy in Germany, while he was connected with France by education and by military service in the war against Edward I. As no other candidate had any chance of election, Henry VII. was chosen without opposition on October 28, 1308. The Hapsburgs found it necessary to acknowledge the new king on condition of receiving confirmation of their fiefs.

The personal career of Henry VII. belongs rather to the |Italian expedition.| history of Italy than that of Germany, and will be considered in the following chapter. From the first he seems to have looked on Germany as a foreigner, and abandoned the policy of his predecessor for the wild dream of reviving the imperial power of the Hohenstaufen in Italy at the head of the Ghibelline party. In 1310 he set out on his southern expedition, which resulted in little beyond his coronation in Rome (June 29, 1312). He never returned to Germany. But before his departure he took some steps which were fraught with future consequence. To conciliate the princes he withdrew the concessions by which Albert had purchased the support of the towns. In 1310 |Concessions to the princes.| he prohibited the creation of pfahlbürger, and restored their tolls to the Rhenish princes. In the same year he seized the opportunity to obtain a great acquisition for his family. The Bohemians were in rebellion against Henry of Carinthia, and offered the crown to Henry VII.’s son, John, on condition that he should marry Elizabeth, |John of Bohemia.| daughter of Wenzel II. The offer was accepted; but so little did Henry care even for his family interests in comparison with his chimerical schemes, that he did not delay his advance into Italy, and left the securing of his son’s throne to the Archbishop of Mainz, Peter von Aspelt. Fortunately, the enterprise did not require his presence. Henry of Carinthia was expelled, and John of Luxemburg was firmly seated on the Bohemian throne.

During the Italian expedition, which ended in Henry VII.’s |France seizes Lyons.| death near Siena (August 24, 1313), the interests of the German monarchy were neglected, the princes were left in complete independence, and Philip IV. was enabled to carry on his aggressions with impunity. In 1310 he took advantage of a dispute between the archbishop and the citizens of Lyons to send French troops into the city, and in 1312 the former was compelled to make a treaty by which he acknowledged the suzerainty of France.

Forty years had now elapsed since the close of the Great |Importance of period 1273-1313 in German history.| Interregnum. The kingly office had been revived, and had been held by four princes, each of whom had shown considerable vigour and capacity. But the absence of hereditary succession had rendered impossible the pursuit of any efficient scheme for the enforcement of central authority and the repression of princely independence. The greatest successes in this direction had been gained by Albert I., but they had been rendered nugatory by his untimely death and by his successor’s absorption in dreams of reviving the universal empire. Germany in 1313, as in 1273, was a mere bundle of states under a nominal head, while its neighbours England and France had been receiving a strong national organisation under the capable rule of Edward I. and Philip IV. That Germany escaped for a century from the worst consequences of her disunion was mainly due to the jarring interests of the neighbouring states which led to the Hundred Years’ War.

But it is misleading to regard the history of these forty years as a mere chronicle of heroic efforts ending in hopeless failure. The very divisions of Germany, while they weakened its nationality, gave greater scope and variety to local development. From this period we date the rise to greatness of the two vigorous dynasties of Luxemburg and Hapsburg. To it we have also to look for the first origins of the Swiss Confederation [see chap. vii.], for the rise of the Hanseatic League [see chap. xviii.], and for the establishment of a great territorial power in Prussia by the Teutonic Order [see chap. xix.]. It is necessary to follow the fortunes of the monarchy in order to understand why German development was so different from that of other contemporary states, but the real interest of German history is to be found in the vigorous growth of these political organisations on the extremities rather than in the declining vitality of the central power.